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Diener Award in Social Psychology

The Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology is designed to recognize a mid-career scholar whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the social psychology field and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.

Award Info

Description

About the Award

First given in 2007, the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology is designed to recognize a mid-career scholar (approximately 15-25 years from their first tenure-track appointment) whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the social psychology field and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.

Recipients of this award receive a $1000 honorarium and accompanying plaque, which are presented at the annual Awards Ceremony held at the SPSP Annual Convention. In addition, up to $1500 for convention travel, registration, and hotel expenses are provided, as well as a complimentary one-year SPSP membership. This award was endowed by Carol and Ed Diener through the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology.

From Ed Diener

(Published in the Fall 2007 SPSP Dialogue)

My wife, Carol, and I are honored to be among the first major donors to the SPSP Foundation. We are excited by the opportunities the foundation will afford, and how it will enhance social and personality psychology. This is why we decided to make a substantial donation to the foundation in its earliest days.

The Society of Personality and Social Psychology is one of a handful of elite societies in the behavioral sciences. It continues to do wonderful work to promote our field, and has been successful beyond our wildest dreams. The foundation will help extend these activities even farther by making funds available for new initiatives.

The mid-career awards in both personality and social psychology that our gift will help fund will benefit the field by giving recognition to our outstanding scientists. The gifts will help promote the careers of those selected for the awards, but will also help promote our field by drawing attention to the most important research being conducted in our field. One of the reasons we decided to donate money at this time is to encourage others to also make donations—both large and small. We are all committed to furthering the field of psychology, and personality and social psychology in particular. Indeed, for most of us, who are members of SPSP, the field is a major part of our identity, and has our loyalty. Thus, I encourage each of you to seriously consider making a substantial gift to the foundation now. If you are unable to make a substantial gift at this time, a modest yearly gift will, over time, become substantial. For SPSP to continue to be at the forefront of personality and social psychology each of us must not only excel as scientists but also provide financial support. Please make your donations now.

We are so happy to be able to support this important cause! Recipients of this award receive a $1000 honorarium and accompanying plaque, which are presented at the annual Awards Ceremony held at the SPSP Annual Convention. In addition, travel and registration to the convention are provided, as well as a complimentary one-year SPSP membership.

Eligibility

Requirements

Recipients will be mid-career (approximately 15-25 years past their first appointment) who have made significant contributions to the field of social psychology.

How to Apply

Submission Criteria

Individuals may self-nominate or be nominated by others

A letter of recommendation detailing how the nominee’s work fits the award criteria is required

Nominee's current vita in electronic format

How to Submit

2017 - Carsten K. W. De Dreu

Carsten K.W. De Dreu is full professor at Leiden University (Social and Organizational Psychology), at the Center for Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED) at the University of Amsterdam, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is an elected fellow of several learned societies, including the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Association for Psychological Science, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He is a former president of the International Association for Conflict Management (2001), and the European Association for Social Psychology (2008-2011). His unusually innovative and integrative scientific research and teaching focuses on the neurobiological and psychological underpinnings of cooperative decision making, conflict regulation, group decision making, and creativity. Not only has he made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to social psychology, he has also expanded the scope of his work to encompass issues related to the neuroscience of social behavior and individual differences. On these and related topics he published widely in scientific journals such as Science, Proceedings National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. For his work he received several awards, including most influential article awards from the Academy of Management (2009, 2010), the William Owens Scholarly Achievement Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2014), the 2014 Kurt Lewin Medal for mid-career achievements in social psychology from the European Association of Social Psychology, and the 2015 KNAW-Hendrik Muller Award for his contributions to the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

2016 - Adam Galinsky

Adam Galinsky is world renowned expert on the social psychology of power, diversity, negotiations, and morality. His work has changed the way we think about these topics, whether it’s exploring the psychological mindset of power, how lacking control creates patterns in the mind, or the role of perspective-taking in reducing intergroup bias, or understanding how foreign experiences impact long-term cognitive processes. Galinksy has published more than 160 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including 30 Psych Science and 20 JPSP articles and has over 16,000 google scholar citations. His recent book, Friend & Foe (Penguin Random House, 2015) offers a radically new perspective on conflict and cooperation. Galinsky is currently the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia University, and formerly was the Morris and Alice Kaplan Prof. of Ethics and Decision in Management at Northwestern University. He recently received the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and was listed as one of the best Thinkers on Talent, Thinkers50, 2015.

2015 - Michele Gelfand, Ph.D.

Michele Gelfand is Professor and Distinguished University Scholar Teacher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she has been on the faculty since receiving her PhD in 1996 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is also an affiliate of the RH Smith School of Business, and leads a diverse group of scholars within the Social Decision Making and Organizational Science area. Dr. Gelfand is an accomplished scholar in the field of social psychology who embodies the qualities that the Diener award seeks to celebrate: she integrates different levels of analysis (genetic, neuroscience, psychological, cultural, and historical) to make significant contributions to three domains of research. They are (1) how the strength of cultural norms and cultural values (what she calls “tightness-looseness”) influences a range of social behaviors such as morality; (2) negotiation and conflict; (3) diversity and justice, including topics such as revenge and forgiveness. More recently, she has studied subjective culture in the Middle East. Her work is deeply interdisciplinary and incorporates a variety of methods ranging from behavioral laboratory studies to fieldwork, computational methods, and neuroscience methods. Her research speaks to many different scientific cultures (computer scientists, neuroscientists, political scientists, and increasingly biologists) as well as to geographic cultures. Indeed, her published work has reached audiences far beyond social psychology, with numerous influential publications in journals of cultural psychology, applied psychology, and organizational behavior, as well as in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

2014 - Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.

The Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychologyis designed to recognize a mid-career scholar who has made sigThe members of the Diener Award Committee are delighted to nominate Lisa Feldman Barrett for the 2014 Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology for her outstanding contributions to social psychology. Dr. Feldman Barrett is one of the most influential leaders in the field of emotion. As a deep thinker who is willing to challenge conventional wisdom, she has developed groundbreaking theory and conducted research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of human emotion. Moreover, she is noted for the use of multiple methods and types of evidence, including experiments, experience sampling, fMRI, and cross-cultural studies, to examine important questions about the fundamental nature of emotion. In addition to her outstanding research record, Dr. Feldman Barrett has provided exceptional mentorship to emerging scholars.

Dr. Feldman Barrett’s 6 edited volumes and 170+ publications reflect her strong theoretical and interdisciplinary approach to understanding human emotion and its implications for human behavior and well-being. She has published in, and her work has been cited in, not only the most prestigious journals in social psychology but also in journals for neuroscience, clinical psychology, biology, organizational behavior, and psychiatry. Indeed, her research on the structure of affect, the neurobiology of the affect system and how it changes with age, and individual variation in affective learning and behavior has important practical implications for a variety of contexts. Dr. Feldman Barrett’s distinctive insights on emotions make her quite deserving of this award.

2013 - Nalini Ambady, Ph.D.

We are delighted to present the 2013 Carol and Ed Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology to Dr. Nalini Ambady. Dr. Ambady has an extraordinary record of contributions to the field. Her research, professional service, and mentoring of young scholars have been truly exceptional. Dr. Ambady received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. She held faculty appointments at Holy Cross, Harvard, and Tufts, before joining the faculty at Stanford University in 2011. With over 150 publications in the field’s most prestigious outlets, Dr. Ambady has established herself as one of the most influential leaders in the discipline. Her innovative research has contributed enormously to the understanding of such central topics as social perception, nonverbal behavior, stereotypes, self-identity, dyadic interaction, and emotion recognition. Dr. Ambady’s research on "thin slices” has been groundbreaking, convincingly demonstrating that social, emotional, and perceptual judgments made on the basis of very brief observations of behavior can be surprisingly accurate.

2012 - Dacher Keltner, Ph.D.

Dr.Dacher Keltner embodies the qualities that this award seeks to recognize: groundbreaking research and theory (with a particular emphasis on positive emotion and status hierarchies), wide visibility both within the field (he has served as associate editor for JPSP, is currently an associate editor for Psychological Review, and is co-author of an influential textbook) and outside of the field (he is director of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and was recognized as one of the world’s top 50 visionaries by Utne Magazine in 2008), and research that bridges disciplines (in particular, social psychology, business, biology, and evolutionary thought). Dr. Keltner also has contributed greatly to the field through his outstanding teaching and mentoring of both undergraduate and graduate students. Dr. Keltner’s four books and 150 publications have made significant contributions to social psychological topics centering around positive emotion, morality, and status. His articles typically appear in our field’s top journals and a number of them been singled out for distinction. In contrast to the dominant emphasis in psychology on social problems, Dr. Keltner’s research consistently emphasizes the positive side of human nature. He is widely credited with establishing a new research area in the study of positive emotions, including laughter, awe, and pride, among other topics. He is also widely recognized for his contributions to the study of power and hierarchy,and most recently, his groundbreaking empirical work on the psychological legacy of social class.

2011 - Galen Bodenhausen, Ph.D.

Galen Bodenhausen is a very accomplished scholar who has contributed in several important ways to the field of social psychology through his exceptional research, his service, and his mentoring of young scientists. With over 100 publications to date, Galen Bodenhausen has been one of the most influential leaders in the field of social cognition. Much of his research has examined the cognitive processes that govern categorical thinking, stereotyping, and prejudice, especially the role of stereotypes as judgmental heuristics that ease information processing. His more recent theoretical and empirical work has focused on stereotype and attitude change. He has also conducted ground-breaking research on the role of incidental affect on stereotyping and the mechanisms through which perceivers process visually ambiguous or complex social information. In addition to these important empirical contributions, he has also published significant theoretical pieces and reviews in several prestigious outlets, including the Annual Review of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

2010 - Michael Hogg

2009 - Jeff Simpson

2008 - Mahzarin Banaji

2007 - Dan Gilbert

Contact

2017 Chair

2018 Chair

SPSP Awards Coordinator

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